62

When Reyland woke up at his house, it was eight in the evening. He went down into the empty kitchen and put on some coffee. A note on the granite kitchen island said that everybody was at Sadie’s clarinet performance. His knuckles cracked as he balled the paper into his fist.

Two hours later, he had his driver let him off at the Hoover Building’s 10th Street side.

“Evening, Deputy Assistant, or is it Director now?” Harry Naylor, the most veteran of the FBI security cops on the night shift, said quietly as he came into the lobby.

Reyland stopped and looked down at the mustached veteran’s poker face. Like everyone else there at the puzzle palace that was FBI HQ, even the damn security guards were coy and cryptic masters of innuendo and rumor.

“When I become director, first order will be purging the deadwood,” Reyland said coldly as he passed the desk. “So believe me, Naylor, you’ll be among the very first to know.”

Off the elevator on seven, instead of making a left down the long corridor toward his office, Reyland immediately made a right.

He came around a deserted corner and key fobbed himself in through an unmarked gray door.

Five feet from the hall door inside stood a white steel box that almost looked like a small shipping container. There were thick beige-colored electronic cabinets attached to the front of it, and to the right of the cabinets was a small shiny silver metallic door.

The antiseptic white walls and fluorescent light inside the box gave it a look of a doctor’s examination room. In its center was a rolling office chair surrounded by three computer terminals and two huge black flat screens.

The room inside a room was called a SCIF, short for Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility. Sound-baffled with electromagnetically sealed steel plate walls, it thwarted even the most sophisticated remote electronic eavesdropping methods.

He wouldn’t have come in to the office at all except that he wanted to return a call from London. Technically, it had been a text message. One with three long-awaited, very intriguing words.

Very Good News, it said.

He closed the door and typed the required coding into one of the terminals. The closest of the two screens blinked on a moment later, and a short sixtysomething woman with overdone glamour-puss makeup and big owl-like spectacles was staring at him.

“Well, you’re looking cheery, Robert,” the woman said.

The woman’s name was Brooke Wrenhall, and she was his contact at MI6. He had worked with Wrenhall several times over the last fifteen years and liked the feisty, extremely sharp, bitchy Brit.

“It’s this wonderful lighting,” Reyland said.

“Long day?” she said.

“Long career,” Reyland said. “Just trying to keep it going. Getting harder and harder these days.”

“Well, hopefully my tidings will help on that front.”

“News?”

“The doctor picked up our package.”

Reyland fell back into the office chair as if he’d been shot.

“No!” he yelled.